Image: American Stage I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what happened in Orlando. I grew up there. Played at Eola Park. Read books in the downtown library. In high school, I was a stockboy at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. For a big chunk of my life, I worked as a journalist in Florida, covering everything from mundane county government meetings to gruesome serial killings. Now I make video games for a living. Knee Deep’s a dark, strange little swamp noir adventure that revels in the weird news headlines that usually bubble up from Florida. It delves into the exploitation of celebrity deaths, creepy cult religions, and cultural insensitivity. It’s got nothing to do with horrors like what happened in Florida this past weekend. Right now, I count my blessings that I don’t have to impose myself on the survivors or relatives and friends of the victims or, God forbid, the lunatic who gunned down dozens of people in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. I don’t have to ask them what they think about the massacre or why they think Omar Mateen turned from abusive spouse to mass murderer. Yet, like many other people, I want to know why it happened. I want to make sense of it. I’m sick and tired of incidents like this. Not just because of the bloodshed and the heartbreaking losses, but because of the immediate knee-jerk reactions of people turning a tragedy into grist for their ideological mills, whether it’s an anti-Muslim agenda or the drumbeat for gun control. I see too many people willing to blame someone’s religion (covered by the First Amendment) while they cling tightly to their desire to own weapons of mass murder through the Second Amendment. I don’t think most Muslims want to destroy the rest of us any more than I think the murders of churchgoers in Charleston mean Christians want to wipe everyone else out. It’s not my wish to see all Americans stripped of their precious guns. You want a handgun to protect your home? Fine. Need a rifle for hunting deer? OK. But does someone like me - like you - really need a gun that’s capable of quickly killing 50 people? I don’t think so, unless you’re a soldier enlisted in the military and shipped off to enemy territory. I understand we can’t protect everyone from lunatics. I know demented, damaged people left unchecked are going to find some way - the wrong way - to deal with their issues, whether that means hurting themselves or others. I just don’t know how to explain horrors like this to my son when I can barely grasp the enormity of it myself. Because, at the heart of all this, we’ve got an American citizen whose rage erupted in gunfire from a weapon he apparently acquired through legal means. People who should have seen this coming didn’t. A system that should’ve prevented him from owning that gun didn’t. And now we mourn a senseless tragedy in Orlando - one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history, just miles from the Happiest Place on Earth. I can’t wrap my mind around it. Perhaps, on a certain level, I don’t want to have to process it, take ownership of it, because that’s one more step toward accepting it as “just something that happens.” Something normal. What steps can we take to prevent that? What steps are we willing to take? Sadly, we’ve done next to nothing in the wake of Columbine, Aurora, Newtown, and Charleston. So here we are again. Only this time it happened in my hometown. Whose hometown is next? *** How you can help:

• Give to the GoFundMe campaign for victims and families of the Pulse shootings.
• Give blood.
• Get help, if you need it.